DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMIC HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author, part I: Historical Materialism

Before I start this series, I should say that there isn't, strictly speaking, a rhyme or reason as to why I'm doing them in the order that I am. One 'needn't' lead to the other, however, to get the rest, I do think it best to start with the big HM, historical materialism. As a heterodox economist myself, Lord knows I've gone to more than my fair share of a conferences that have the words Historical Materialism in them, and of course there's the peer-reviewed Marxist journal of the same name. So, the concept of historical materialisms is, to put it mildly, at least a little important in discussing Marxist thought, both politically and academically.

So, what is it? Well, before we kill Marx, let's remember who he was in life. As I've mentioned before, Marx was born in Trier, Prussia in 1818. For those unfamiliar with European history, 1818 saw the world recovering from a European conflict that had quickly become a global conflict because of colonialism. This time, the conflict in question was the Napoleonic War (1804-1815). For the Prussians, and the wider German states alike, the main thing to remember from the Napoleonic War was how the French had, for want of better phrase, blitz both the kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire, dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, and shook Germanic pride to its core whilst also demonstrating the gross incompetence of the monarchal ruling class across the all the various German states. For Marx's generation, the Napoleonic War would rest in their minds the way the Second World War had rested in the minds of my dad's generation. It was the large status-quo shattering event that they were born immediately after, and the politics and economics of the continent were defined almost entirely by the shadow of this immense, and chronologically 'next door' event.

Previous notions of 'God's plan' being enacted through divine representation on earth via kings and popes had already spent the 18th century on the decline, and the explosive end of the 18th and slightly more explosive beginning of the 19th through the French revolution and subsequent Napoleonic War brought with it to Europe two new ideas. First, humans, the masses even, shaped their own destiny. Second, many of the revolutionaries in Europe had competing visions of 'the future', thinking of 'the future' had previously not occurred at scale, as the idea had been of non-stop continual European aristocracy. Now the last vestiges of that notion were gone, burnt away by the failures of Germanic aristocracy to stop French aggression across Europe, and then done away again by a European fascist trying and failing to invade Russia in the winter whilst Britain drained away its resources on the Western front, albeit this time in Spain.

Speaking of the British, the industrial revolution had kicked off in the mid-18th century. By the time Marx had reached his twenties, Britain had entered a period known as 'rail mania' when a bunch of capitalists (who had received extensive government funding in the guise of 'reparations' from having lost their slaves) felt the need to invest in a brand new technology, frequently proposing impossible projects, getting government investment in these proposed projects, and then either partially realising them before immediately going out of business. In the midst of this, of course, some of these railways would end up being successful, because a certain number of them were common-sense endeavours. (Connecting London to industrial Yorkshire cities and then connecting those to Edinburgh. Bam! East Coast Main Line, turns out didn't need dozens of failed Yorkshire mini-railways to pull that off).

Prussia, and many other German states (Bavaria, looking at you) saw this rapid explosion of the British 'economy' (on more of that, later) and decided that having a piece of that would likely help stop France having another go at a 'Confederation of the Rhine'. A lot of German intellectual types, and Prussian statesmen, also noticed the shocking lack of a Holy Roman Empire, and thought to fix that with a unified, and de-monarchised, German state. People today love to use the term 'liberal' to mean all things left-of-centre, whilst liberalism is, frankly, centre to right-of-centre by today's standards. Nonetheless, pan-Germanism in its initial goals (unified German republic) was indeed both liberal and leftist. Of these leftists come our dear friend Karl Marx, then aged 30, when around 1848 he decided that pan-Germanism needed to be as left-wing as many of the German aristos were already claiming it was:

A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

As you can see, by the time Marx penned the Manifesto, the term Communist was already being used as a pejorative against any and all ideas that might deign to show a bit of progressive thought behind it. That is, some things never fucking change. Similarly, the 'old powers of Europe' were spending more time and energy putting down progressive thought than making actual improvements or going after genuine threats. Again, it might be depressing to acknowledge how little things have changed in the century and change since Marx's manifesto was published.

Spoiler alert, for those reading history as if it were a novel for some odd reason, the 1848 German revolutions failed, and many of the leaders of the various movements found themselves needing to flee. Marx fled to the United Kingdom, London more specifically, where he would spend the rest of his life. By this point, Britain itself was in the midst of a series of reforms called, well, 'The Great Reform', because we are not a creative people. There have been entire PhDs, academic careers, and pop history books dedicated to The Great Reform and trying to sort out the heroes, the villains, and whether or not the reform succeeded or not. Definite wins include the rapid expansion of suffrage, though still not to women, as well as the expansion of education, child labour laws, and something starting to maybe approach general employment laws. Britain in 1890 was definitely a 'fairer' place than it was in 1830, but only because 1830 was bleak as hell.

Like most British politics through most of our history, the centre-left paternalistic liberal party, first the Whig Party and then the Liberal Party, brought some treats for their working class voters, in a way appealing to the eye, but arguably in a way still designed to maximise benefit for the landed aristocracy and established capitalist class. The relationship between the aristocracy and the capitalists we will return to, in a future post, but for now know that Marx moved to Britain at a time when reform was clearly necessary, but many people found the two parties in power (Liberal and Conservative) unappealing. For my British readers, I promise this isn't a direct reference to our current situation, we're just always like this.

From the failed formation of a republican German state in 1848, and into the political battle that was 'The Great Reformation' comes Marx, and the insight he brings is simple: The economic and political realities of Britain and Germany as he's observing in the mid-19th century is a direct result of their respective histories. People had, painstakingly over the preceding centuries, built the systems that drove Britain and Germany, had brought prosperity to Britain and Germany, and dictated the material conditions of all people within. The British and German working classes had emerged from idle serfdom due to the material conditions brought to them by the movement of history that brought German and Britain away from their feudal states and into this capitalist mode of production that was visiting considerable material change to the British isles and the Germanic lands.

Human history, decided Marx, could be divided into stages, and the economic history similarly should be understood as thus. Out of the inefficiency of feudal landlords did Britain and Germany leap into the age of capitalism. Capitalism was necessary, thought Marx, to achieve the primitive accumulation of wealth, goods, and other resources that would later be redistributed to the working masses once the capitalist stage of evolution had finished. It would not finish, said Marx, out of the goodness of the hearts of the capitalist class, who would likely violently fight to maintain their power, just like the monarchs and aristocrats before them had throughout the French Revolution and the failed 1848 German Revolution. No, the Communist era would come as a result of a new revolution, one by the workers and not by the bourgeois class. (More on that in the class entry). At which point, councils of workers would examine and improve the material conditions of all others within this new Communist state.

First, it should be noted that both Harvey and Eagleton warn against a utopian reading of this. Several utopian ideals had already visited Europe before Marx's time and failed the way that most utopian movements tend to. Indeed, utopianism is the easiest way for people to dismiss Marx's work, since utopia is, more often than not, mere wishful thinking with an abject rejection of the realities of human nature. Marx knew and wrote repeatedly that absolute democracy would be needed, with absolute accountability, to ensure that this government for the workers by the workers would work and survive. The capitalist class would need to have their power removed completely in order to ensure that they would not use their considerable means to subvert the new government and overthrow the welfare programmes and undermine the good of the worker (looking at you, Attlee and Roosevelt, this is where you messed up).

Now comes the part where we kill the author. For the first time, at least. I mean, he's already dead. Like I said in the last paragraph, some read this and immediately jumped to utopia. This is naive, and a discredit to the academic rigorousness of Marx himself as well as of the Marxists that follow. Utopian Marxist thinking also is the scourge of the intellectually lazy in the centre and the right who want to hand-wave away the contributions of Marx and Marxists to wider economic theory. The second place is why I took the time to run through Marx's life story here. Britain and Germany are two very different countries, in many ways. However, they're both still Western European countries. Very few countries across the globe are Western European countries. In fact, the vast majority aren't.

Above I cited the fairly famous introduction of the Communist Manifesto, and the first obvious thing to notice about it is that Marx discusses the powers of old Europe. The United States existed at this time, but was not worthy of note in European discussion. Further, Marx was unworried about reprisal from the US, China, or the Ottomans, hence why he didn't really need to address any of the powers outside Europe. If we brought out a map of Europe and asked Marx to point out which nation(s) would become the global champion of Communism and which would collapse into nationalistic/fascist dictatorship, it is likely that Marx would've assumed Britain and Germany would be the major socialist states (if only) and that France and/or Russia would be the nationalistic/fascist ones. (Yes, I know that fascism wasn't really a concept in the modern sense of the term yet, but there had already been proto-fascists like Napoleon, Cromwell, various Tsars, etc).

As we will discuss in a couple future posts, history did not play out that way. Germany went full Nazi, of course, and Britain and America spent the better part of the 20th century trying to constantly undermine the various socialist uprisings, with various degrees of success. Much of Lenin's work was already evidence of Marxists trying to challenge and expand Marx to move beyond the scope of Western Europe. A great deal of Lenin's more academic work, before and during the Russian Revolution, was about whether or not a state could skip the capitalist primitive accumulation stage. This was a concern for Lenin, as Russia was, rather famously, still stuck in a largely feudalistic agrarian society, an issue that would face Marxists in China and India as well. It is rather hard to redistribute wealth in societies where it hasn't accumulated. Yes the Russian oligarchs were wealthy, but still not as wealthy as their British or German counterparts. (Both then and now, although now we can also add in the American billionaire class to the British, French, and German one).

Africa, of course, had followed a different trajectory to Europe and Asia. There were some systems in Africa approaching European or Asian kingdoms, such as the Asante, Hausa, Benin, Yoruba, Mali, and Igbo kingdoms along the western coast of Africa, inside (among others) present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Niger, Nigeria, and Mali. But the tendency to build formalised Eurasian style kingdoms in pre-colonial Africa was not as pronounced. This resulted in a falsehood amongst European colonisers that Africa did not have a history before European arrival and the 'gift' of European civilisation. So pronounced was this myth that when British soldiers looted metal works out of the Benin capital city, they assumed the metal works had been brought there by the Portuguese, rather than made indigenously, a falsehood pushed by the British Museum until the early 2000s. These metal pieces are still on display in the lacklustre Africa exhibit in the British Museum, with no acknowledgement of how they got there, or of the previous falsehood. (The British Museum is not too far from my office).

Marx himself was largely ignorant of Africa, a fact that can be forgiven, since he was doing his work in central London in the 19th century, lacked access to aeroplanes, and the internet had not yet been invented. As such, he was utterly reliant on British and European academics to tell him about Africa, and these people were generally racist liars. Further, the bulk of Marx's life and work was done before the crime against humanity that was the Berlin Conference of 1881, wherein European powers divided claims on the African continent without so much of a thought of the locals themselves, bringing many of today's borders into existence. The main consideration of the foreign powers in Africa, both then and now, was principally of resource extraction. (Read King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild to read about Belgium's genocide in the Congo over rubber, and know that whilst the Belgians were easily the most evil on the continent, the French, Germans, British, and Americans weren't exactly far behind. Indeed, several British, French, and American corporations funded and demanded many of the things done in the Congo by the Belgians).

The rape of Africa by Western corporations made Marxism very attractive to many independence advocates. However, since the bourgeois class exploiting them was largely foreign, and was intent on cultural genocide, there was a need for some additional shaping of Marxist philosophy into the African context. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti being a particularly interesting example. Further, African Marxists needed to bring race into the discussion, as much of the justification of European colonialism was based on the presumption of racial and cultural superiority. In both Africa and India, there was also a need to critique not only the exploitation by a foreign capitalist class, but also to address inequalities in pre-colonial class structures that had been propped up by the colonisers in order to consolidate rule. Pan-Africanism was largely born out of such critiques. We will return to these ideas in further entries in this series.

The key take-away for today is simple. Historical materialism means that we can and should engage in a scientific study of historical institutions, politics, and choices that have led us to the present material reality. Further, the present material reality can be entirely understood as a human phenomenon that can be studied and altered through scientific means and political action. Things have not 'always been this way', nor was there any predestination that things had to 'end up this way'. Before Thatcher brought us the idea of 'There is No Alternative' (TINA), Marx had rejected this as the lie of the capitalist class to steal from the masses. This bit is universal, and the 'death of the author' is in the debates around what this means in the particular contexts found outside of Western Europe. (For the purposes of this series, the settler colonists of the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are 'Western Europe'). Additional context was, and is, needed to address the genocidal nature of race 'science' and gender 'science', and Marxists since the death of the man, both literal and metaphorical, have been adding to the scope of work we call 'Marxist' to address these additional needs.

Next week, the 'Death of the Author' and the Ownership of the Means of Production.

As always, comment with questions, thoughts, opinions, etc., of your own below and please share.